This blog is dedicated to my research on sustainability & society. Here you can find my latest ideas and thoughts as well as publications and talks on sustainability science, the discourse on postgrowth & degrowth, ecological economics, corporate responsibility, systems theory and organizational change within the next society. I’m also increasingly writing about the new era of geopolitics and Europe’s role in it, with a special focus on sustainability topics reframed from a geopolitical perspective. Feedback is always welcome.
Future Viability or Sustainability? On Innovation and Industrial Transformation
This essay develops the argument of my lecture on sustainability and innovation at the GSaME annual conference 2026 at the University of Stuttgart.
Innovation acquires much of its appeal from a promise about the future. A new technology will preserve competitiveness, improve production or create possibilities that were previously unavailable. Yet the capacity to secure a company’s future says little, by itself, about the future made possible for others. An innovation can succeed commercially while intensifying pressures on the ecological and social conditions on which economic activity depends.… Read more
Orientation without Certainty: On the Capacity to Act in our Unclear World
This essay develops the argument of my keynote “Die neue Unübersichtlichkeit” at the CARS 2.0 Transformations-Gipfel on 8 October 2026.
Stuttgart’s industrial future depends on whether the region can put its accumulated capabilities to work under conditions that no longer resemble those in which they developed. Automotive and mechanical engineering remain substantial assets. But the markets, technologies and political relationships that made them successful are changing together. The task is to preserve the capacity to develop and produce complex systems while changing the applications, organisational arrangements and dependencies through which that capacity becomes economically useful.… Read more
Deciding the Undecidable: Why Strategy Needs “Urteilskraft”
tl;dr: Under deep uncertainty, strategy confronts questions no method can settle. Urteilskraft is that capacity: it frames what can be calculated and judges what can be justified.
This essay expands on a talk I gave at the Wissenschaftsfestival Stuttgart 2026, held at ISM Campus Stuttgart under the title “Zukunft, Zweifel, Zuversicht – Future Skills in Zeiten des Umbruchs.”
If there is one place in Europe where nobody needs “times of upheaval” explained to them, it is the Stuttgart region.… Read more
From Growth to Freedom: Ecological Ordoliberalism and the Renewal of the Social Market Economy
tl;dr: To survive in the twenty-first century, the Social Market Economy must move beyond growth as its organising principle. Its future lies not in abandoning markets, but in reordering them around freedom, social reproduction, and ecological limits.
The Social Market Economy remains one of the few political-economic ideas in Germany and, more broadly, in Europe that still carries real normative weight. It evokes a promise that many other formulas no longer can: economic freedom without social cruelty, markets without social disintegration, prosperity without authoritarianism.… Read more
Green AI Beyond Bullsh*t
tl;dr: Green AI can only matter if it moves beyond hype—toward truth, transparency, and regeneration within planetary limits.
Over the past months, hardly a day has passed without headlines about artificial intelligence: new models, astonishing breakthroughs, and dire warnings. At conferences, in boardrooms, and in policy debates, AI has become a kind of secular promise—of productivity, control, even salvation. And increasingly, it comes wrapped in a green label. That convergence between sustainability and digital technology is fascinating, but also deeply ambivalent.… Read more